The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the bursting of the bubble) led to very high prices for a minimal amount of storage.
Over the last year a slew of new services have launched (some are launching in February) with serious web 2.0 features, reasonable pricing (including free unlimited storage) and, in at least one case (OmniDrive), the ability to read/write directly to the file with local applications like Office, on the remote server. This last feature speeds the process of writing to files significantly by skipping the requirement to download the file to the hard drive first.
The Online Storage Gang
We looked at a total of thirteen companies. They are: AllMyData, Box.net, eSnips, Freepository, (the unfortunately named) GoDaddy, iStorage, Mofile, Mozy, Omnidrive, Openomy, Streamload, Strongspace and Xdrive.
Another service, Zingee, has yet to launch and may also (or may not) have a compelling offering.
Of the thirteen companies that we researched for this post, three really stand out. Australia-based OmniDrive (unfunded but not for long) is the clear leader in features. Box.net and Streamload are also very good choices.
The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features - effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here.
Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well.
Web 2.0 Features
Most of the new players (possibly with the exception of Mozy) are laser focused on key web 2.0 features. The best have multiple folders (private, shared, group, public), RSS feeds for each folder, etc. A couple, including Omnidrive, have also built features that allow subscriptions for RSS enclosures (such as podcasts), so that those files are stored in the cloud instead of your hard drive.
And OmniDrive has one key feature that no one else matches: full read/write functionality on the file, in the cloud. Open a file from your Omnidrive, edit it and write it back to Omnidrive without ever downloading a local copy. Once they release their API, I imagine many, many services will mash the Omnidrive storage service into their applications. It is just too compelling not to.
AllMyData, unique among the group, is a full peer-to-peer solution with “grid storage”. This means you give up storage on your hard drive for other users, and you get theirs in return. Putting aside the fact that giving up storage is exactly what users don’t want when looking for a solution, the fact that others’ computers must be powerd up and online for you to be able to access your files is a serious service limitation.
Pricing
Pricing is all over the place, although I expect it to settle down as competition drives some of these companies out of the market.
Streamload is the most aggresive on pricing - offering a full 25 GB free to every user.
The obvious way to market these products, in my opinion, is to boldly offer unlimited storage for a nominal sum. Costs can be covered via a one-time sign up fee and through charges on download bandwidth (once I need the files, I’m willing to pay to get them).
I firmly believe that online storage should, and will, be packaged with new computers and applications like Windows. The amount of unprotected but hugely important media content out there on hard drives (music, movies, home movies, pictures), is growing every day. People need somewhere to back this data up for a reasonable fee, and it seems to me that Dell and others should package this service with the PC. All initial software would be auto stored, and users would have the option to continuously syncronize their hard drive with the virtual drive.
And while this business has thin margins, this is a multi-billion dollar per year revenue opportunity.
The Chart
The information above simply highlights the much more detailed information in the table linked to the left.
We were not able to speak to every company directly and the information available on websites is usually incomplete or hard to find. Therefore, we’ll be updating this table as more and better data comes in. Also, I’m sure I’ve left out any number of competitors in this space, so I will be updating the list of companies as well.
For the full feature comparison table, see here.
Research by Adam Bouskila
Research for this post was conducted by Adam Bouskila, a 17 year old genius who lives in Vancouver, Canada. I cannot thank Adam enough for his hard work, and I hope to work with him again on future posts.
Update: It’s clear to me from comments and emails that this space is exploding, and that I missed a lot of companies and features. I also hadn’t realized Fred Wilson posted on this subject last December, but he has an excellent post here.
Comments
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wasn’t virtual storage a key part of the dot-com boom? what’s changed?
Don’t forget Yahoo! Briefcase, free with 30 MBS…ok nvm
Research for this post was conducted by Adam Bouskila, a 17 year old genius who lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Um, I’m all for thanking your contributors, but applying a “genius” label to someone for doing some simple research is a little much.
I certainly hope those low standards don’t carry over into your actual site reviews.
I dont think they meant that he was a genius because of the research that he did. They were just simply stating that he is a really smart guy.
There are rumors of several more coming down the pipe.
oh, almost forgot… DropSend is an interesting take on online storage as well.
Dave P, #3, He’s pretty damn smart, over and above the research.
Dave P - #5, I stayed away from the guys that allow you to send large files to others, and other related services (Tagworld, for instance, gives everyone 1gb of storage). The list would 100 companies long otherwise.
Yay, good to see someone else posting a feature matrix. Hopefully there will be many more.
Just to clarify a few of the mistakes in the description of Allmydata, you only need to provide storage to the Allmydata network if you want to receive _free_ online storage space; paying subscribers will get storage that does not carry this particular requirement. As to the claim that “others’ computers must be powerd up and online for you to be able to access your files”, I am not quite sure where your boy genius researcher came up with that one but data stored within this network is protected both through advanced error correction and adaptive replication to create a virtual distributed RAID network. There are no requirements for someone else’s computer to be available to get to your data.
Nice overview. It would be great to have the Bandwidth Throttles/month row filled out a bit more, since that’s where it seems a lot of the expense often is.
One feature I really want that I didn’t see mentioned - an auto-backup feature. I realize this would take a desktop client or something, but that’s perfectly fine with me.
Hi Mike,
I understand that the feature matrix must be short in text. But I do not understand all “features”.
What is bandwidth allocation?
What do you mean by web access? Do you mean online access or actually access the files via the browser?
What exactly are developer kits and what’s the difference to a well documented API?
What do you mean by subscription? RSS?
Whats the difference between a trial version and a demo version? As most services offer a limited amount of free space they do not need that, do they?
What platforms are included in cross platform support?
What do you count as business or consumer edition?
What is developer integration in the features list?
Furthermore I am surprised not to see “blog” as type of communication. Or is this included in newsletters/updates?
Shouldn’t language support rather being a number than a dot? (number of languages supported)
Please do not get me wrong. This is a great list. I just hope you will make it even better for me by explaining these points.
Thanks a lot,
Moritz
# 11 - If that is incorrect it is my error not Adam’s. I’d like to understand allmydata more.
Moritz, These are all good questions and criticisms. One problem was that there was just too many company and data points for the chart, and so things got cut. I can see that I probably cut too much and things that seem obvious to me after getting so deep into this space are not as obvious to everyone else.
Where would a service like Glide Effortless fit into this space? They appear to be more targeted towards media sharing (photos, videos, music) but online storage is a big part of their offering.
Hey Micheal,
I know you can not put it in the matrix. It would use up too much space. But can you comment on it here? That would be very appreciated.
Moritz
Hey Michael,
Thanks for the summary. We appreciate the mention, but quite a bit in the summary table WRT to Freepository is simply not correct. With a nod to your acknowledgement above that you’ll update the chart as you receive additional data, here are some updates about Freepository:
- File versioning (yes - we wonder how this could have been missed. Freepository has been providing version-controlled developer workspaces for nearly seven years)
- Subscriptions (yes)
- Demo (yes - right on the front page)
- Developer integration (seven clients, including Eclipse)
- Workgroups (yes - each freepository implements a versioned workgroup)
- Offline access (yes via remote working directories)
- Public sharing (yes - you can make your freepository public and others can join it)
The service is very developer-centric today, so perhaps that’s why many of these key features weren’t immediately noted.
As I mentioned to you in person at the BBC earlier in the month, we’re working on the API right now. This will allow arbitrary clients to consume our rock-solid version-controlled storage space in ways that are more closely aligned with today’s definition of online storage.
The version control is an important capability & the service we’re exposing will provide this to each client’s files under management.
Exciting times. Give me a call if you need more details on any of this points.
The correct URL for Freepository is
https://freepository.com
There’s a minor typo in the article (get some sleep Michael…
)
John, fixed. thanks
Mozy stands out the most for me, since it’s the most userfriendly and it has a very good simple program that does automatic backups of documents while your computer is idle. Do the rest have this feature?
#25 - this is an interesting comment and something I struggled with. Mozy is a very cool application but it wants to be very different than Omnidrive when it grows up. It more like a foldershare in that it is going to do something really, really well - secure backups. It’s also funded. I’d like to write about Mozy soon in a separate post.
Michael –
It’s Mike from Streamload here. Thanks for including us in this review! Overall, I think Adam did a great job. We often do competitive analysis ourselves and it’s no easy task to distill and compare features in a way that’s easily decipherable. It’s great work for any one at any age.
On a separate note, we were just reviewing the chart and wanted to point out a couple of points that were listed incorrectly about our service. (1) There’s no upload file size limit in our Streamload MediaMax. There is a max download file size (for free users only) of 25 MB per file, but users can upload any size file. (2) We do offer paid subscriptions and for some reason our subscription option wasn’t listed or compared. (3) We do have desktop client software available for free to any user. (4) We do offer public sharing to both free and paid subscribers by giving users a hosted folder.
Also, we do currently have an API that’s publicly available and, this is the first time we’re announcing publicly, but we will also be releasing a completely new Streamload Web Services functionality in the next several weeks. It includes an all new API, SDK, and the highest free web storage limits we’ve seen. Already companies like the Discovery Channel are using a pre-release version of it to power their viewer’s video submissions.
We are very excited about what people will be able to do once they’re easily able to tap into our super efficient file storage and transfer back end. In fact, our service that was reviewed here was built entirely using our own Web Services API.
Mike - #27 - Thank you for your feedback. Yep, its nearly impossible to get everything right. I’ll be updating the table once I’ve gathered more input, and I’d like to do a separate writeup on you when you are ready.
I’ve been using Carbonite to backup my photos, it has worked flawlessly. They are currently selling through Staples. ~$2.50/month for unlimited backup. Adding Outlook and Office support in the future.
More detailed review: http://c2web.blogspot.com/2006.....ackup.html
Myron
I use Carbonite as well and they rock! You should add them to any future posts. It is a simple “set it and forget it” desktop client that automatically backs up your stuff. It’s cheap, unlimited, and the easiest back up solution I have ever seen.
It would be good to put the table up in html format… that JPG is hard to read guys.
As a minor additional datapoint, I would like to second the point made by others that the category “online storage” covers a lot of ground and when you try to mash together apps/services that specialize in one particular facet (e.g. backups, media sharing, collaboration spaces, etc.) you are bound to get complaints about categorization and feature sets depending on what the user is actually aiming to get from the app or service.
While the space is not very large at the moment, everyone seems to have a different perspective on what is or is not important depending on the particular need they are trying to address. Perhaps a better first-pass breakdown of the various offerings might start with addressing the specific general use cases and going from there…
Re #1 wasn’t virtual storage a key part of the dot-com boom? what’s changed?
This is my first reaction too, but a few things have changed. Digital cameras & camera phones are now ubiquitous, and personal music collections have grown huge. Also, if the mashup phenomenon takes off, you will need to pipe things to a file somewhere.
Even so, this is a commodity market; there will be a common API which all desktop & net apps use. There will be one or two acquisitions, and everyone else will fall over.
And for mobile always-on storage, nothing beats a flash drive. Online bins are for sharing and backup, not mobility.
which is the site with UNLIMITED storage? you mention it, dont have a link to it and call it “multiply” on your jpeg….thats something pretty hard to find in google…
can you please update with a link?
thanks.
Multiply is the service with unlimited storage, gkra. Also, by searching ‘Multiply’ in Google, the first link leads to their website. Granting they are more about social networking, they have unlimited storage with monthly upload limits.
This really puzzles me, since http://www.storegate.com /.co.uk / .se already had these features and had for almost 2 years almomst. Automatic backup from PC and the Cellphone (over-air), very tight security (Class 3 serverhalls, most secure on in Europe), WebDAV server running in the background allowing people to create/edit/save/etc files straight on the server. Software to mount the storage to a localdrive in your computer. Ability to store files by mail aswell as the normal way with FTP/Web-upload/WebDAV .. And to be clear, I do work @ storegate, and therefor I can give you the inside info that the prices shown on webpages will within 3 weeks be cut down with almost 80%. Now mr TechCrunch, maybe check that out? Second time I mention Storegate in the comments of a storage-online-thread.
if you’re looking for a place to store and share your images, i’ve found celum IMAGINE who have launched their beta of a hosted version http://www.smartimagine.com yesterday
Boo yeah. Storage bubble deja vu
thanks for this comparison!
It seems one of the older and more established companies has been overlooked - iBackup. They are fairly similar to Xdrive, or at least were before Xdrive made some recent changes. Thanks for the great review though, and the gentle prodding of the industry as a whole. I can’t understand why it’s so hard to find a reliable company to backup my 5+ GB (and growing) worth of family photos. As you mention, you’d think a lot of people have this problem….
Klas from MyWebDesktop.
Thanks for a great list!
It will be interesting to see what will happen with this market. So many services are converging, such as Storing&Sharing&Collaborating with Files, bookmarks, collaborative writing etc.
There’s a mistake on the feature grid. Strongspace *does* have a forum:
http://forum.textdrive.com/viewforum.php?id=25
Also, I think it’s major advantages over the other services were grossly under-investigated. Do any of the other services mentioned support rsync? Because that’s the major selling point for Strongspace for me.
I think the article, as intended, was a good start on comparing storage/sharing services in general. I suspect that older, more established companies [#42, #46] were missed precisely because the author(s) and readers of this blog tend to focus on the latest, greatest services on the market.
That said, I think a category that got left out is services that offer storage incidental to their main function. A nod went out to Writely [#6], who, in support of their document creation/collaboration model, naturally offers storage of those documents and their attachments. The sites focus is on image files as attachments, but you can upload any file under 2MB, regardless of type.
Presumably, any other worthwhile Web 2.0 word processor should offer similar storage capability.
Web-based office suites like Zoho Virtual Office, Goffice, ThinkFree Office, and the stuff from 37signals all offer storage as part of their “create and organize” services.
Nice piece, comments and all. Watch out Walt Mossberg!
Thanks, Mike! In future, more indepth reviews, I’d love to see a discussion/comparison of the privacy policies of the different companies as well.
You should also add
http://www.totoexpress.com
I have been testing several services
Whilst not being able to comment on Omnidrive as it requires next beta round to get in
I can highly recommend Strongspace whcih is extremely well organised for business purposes and with secure http://ftp.
Of the rest, streamloadmediamax has a lot going for it with storage space availability and for general media based file storage.
Box.net also looks to be worth looking at with RSS feeds making it something different and useful to the rest.
I guess based on a feature chart as supplied we will see a convergence of features amongst the products.
Anyway, the Strongspace feature comparison is deficient and should be updated. It has many more features in than listed in feature chart.
For a lengthy list of FREE online storage sites, check out CreativeGuy.
GoDaddy is unfortunately named? Actually, their product is called “Online File Folder.” GoDaddy is one of the big noise domain registrars. They have one of the WWE Divas as a spokeschest, and I believe they will have a Super Bowl commercial this year. They’re cheesy, but there is an actual brand behind the “unfortunate” name.
Online storage is not really different than the web hosting business. There are much better deals to be had in the web hosting space because there is more competition. For example dreamhost.com provides 20GB space and 1000GB xfer for $7.95/month. Just ignore the hosting aspect and use the account for backup.
Jon, you see that’s where startups such as Box.net and Omnidrive want to shake things up and they will. It’s not going to be just backup, they want to take it to the next step with sharing and many other innovations that may be covered here in the near future. Online personal hubs are going to become mainstream in the future.